Battleground Georgia: Democrats see 2014 flip

A win could potentially reshape the national political landscape. | AP Photo

Then get Carter, heir to the other great Georgia Democratic name, to run up the tally as the gubernatorial candidate. Fill up a diverse slate of candidates running for all 10 statewide offices, and hope that their combined appeal lifts the entire ticket.

“To say someone sat down and drew this out, to say this was a master plan, is not what happened,” chuckled DuBose Porter, a former speaker pro tempore of the state House and 2010 gubernatorial candidate who’s the new state Democratic chairman. He acknowledges, however, that he was nudged along by conversations he had early on with Nunn and Carter, as well as promising signs in polling.

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A year ago, there wasn’t anyone to draw a master plan. The last Democratic state chair had been forced to resign in May 2013 after being suspended by the Georgia Bar and reprimanded for ethical violations. The party communications director was the only staffer left on the payroll, the only one showing up for work every day at the headquarters in a large industrial loft space down by the Atlanta waterworks, where a visitor is more likely to find a gourmet ice cream shop and Anthropologie outpost than the miles of fast food-filled strip malls that line much of the city’s vast suburbs.

“A lot of us were banking on 2016, 2018, because that was when the numbers showed things changing,” said Rebecca DeHart, now the Georgia Democrats’ executive director. “But then Michelle Nunn got into the race.”

At party headquarters, DeHart has dubbed her office the “Max Cleland Suite” — after the one-term Democratic senator from the state who lost reelection in 2002 — while Porter’s is the “Jimmy Carter Suite.” The big meeting table is in their “Situation Room,” where, as it happens, the red chairs tend to collapse when they’re sat on but the blue chairs are more reliable. But most of the action happens in the open area at the far end of the office where they’ve been training canvassers every Thursday and Friday, trying to rebuild 159 different county parties, one door knocker at a time.

Democratic insiders say it’s not that Carter is running so much better than they expected — though he is one of only two gubernatorial challengers in the country to outraise the incumbent during the last fundraising quarter — but that Deal is running worse. That’s a consequence of the 2 inches of snow that managed to paralyze metro Atlanta at the end of January and a scandal around fundraising for his 2010 campaign that have hurt his poll numbers. In a sign of how seriously the GOP is taking Carter, the Republican Governors Association spent a reported half-million dollars last month on an attack ad against the Democratic nominee.

Nunn, meanwhile, is seen by Democrats as their most promising nonincumbent candidate of 2014, with the best shot at flipping a GOP Senate seat. A win by her could mean the difference between keeping the chamber or not. Waiting out the Republican runoff, she’s been a very quiet presence as the Republican free-for-all primary and tough runoff unfolded, sticking mostly to smaller events away from the media glare.

For Nunn or Carter, winning will take more than pulling ahead in November. If no candidate gets over 50 percent on Nov. 4, a runoff will occur on Dec. 2 in the Senate race or on Jan. 6 in the governor’s contest. For a state party that is still putting itself together, getting Democrats to the polls twice in an off-year might be too much to ask.

For now, though, Nunn and Carter are counting on each other and the changes in Georgia.

“The campaigns are different. The issues are different. But there is a huge amount of energy in our state for something new,” Carter said at the Wal-Mart.

Nunn and Carter are both pitching themselves to voters as moderate Democrats, but Republicans are working to link the pair to unpopular leaders in Washington.

“Georgia is a very conservative state — socially, fiscally, however you want to determine,” McNeely said, calling Nunn and Carter “left-wing liberals” who, no matter what they say in the campaign, will support the agenda of Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “The fact that they are in the race and putting on this pretty packaging doesn’t change the content of that packaging.”

But Virgil Fludd, a Democratic state representative who is campaigning for Carter, said the optimism within the party is palpable.

“It’s a great opportunity for people to start to believe in what they see and what they read,” Fludd said. “Each time there’s a new poll, each time there’s a new report with the money that’s been raised and where it’s coming from, it starts to reinforce what people believe could happen.”